Month: September 2010

You had a career spanning sixty decades, and in my heart of hearts you will always be wearing high heels and chasing after Marilyn Monroe. Whether you were on the run with Sidney Poitier (running from a chain gang to an Oscar nom!), or in the bath with Laurence Olivier, or doing your best ‘Cary Grant,’ those eyes and that chin made a lot of wives swoon, including six of your own.

Like this:

Finally, the still I’ve been waiting to see. The Deathly Hallows ad campaign is one of those things where you really wonder why they should even try. At this point, it’s probably the safest cinematic investment any studio could ask for. Two movies? So people are paying double? Done.

I must admit though, as one of the endless legion of Harry Potter fans, I am glad that the book is being split into two films. I’m just a little pissed that I will have to wait six months between them both.

The machines are rebelling and I am first against the wall. At work today, I took a break from pushing paper around and started pushing pixels, via Excel. I love Excel. There is something perverse in the ease with which one can organise by simply copying and pasting. Need to add things up? JUST. ONE. CLICK. No scratching things out on notepads and using your brain. The fact that I remain amazed by machines adding things up might just give a slight hint towards my Luddite tendencies, but as I was in Excel this morning, the program LOCKED ME OUT. It told me that I could not save my work, as ‘this file is already in use by Ashleigh Rajala.’ I am Ashleigh Rajala. How dare it talk back? It was like an insolent teenager refusing to come out of its room once the grounding was over.

I closed out of Excel. Still nothing. Logged in and out of the workstation. Still nothing. And then I resorted to that oh-so-technical of solutions, turning the computer off then on. Still nothing. There goes everything I know about trouble-shooting computers. Time to call IT. Hours later, the problem was solved, all the while this phantom Ashleigh Rajala was logged into Excel. I began to wonder if perhaps this Nega Ashleigh, this Washleigh, was also starting underground fight clubs or something just as nefarious. The end result is the same, whether or not this was a glitch in the Matrix, our days are numbered. The machines are rebelling, and the time is nigh to relearn how to do simple math in our heads. Viva la long division!